It’s ... It’s ...!— A Linguistic Analysis of the Result of the Python Poll—Pythagorina P. ap Pythonius SpecGram Vol CXC, No 3 Contents Artik-U-l8 Phoneme Services—Advertisement

Polyglot DerivativesPart II

Paul E. and Polly Glōttidēs
X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies

The world is a multilingual place. Increasingly, it is filled with multilingual people. And dang it, they just keep becoming more multilingual all the time. Plenty of Europeans speak more than two languages, and a couple of North Americans do, too.

But this florescent multilingualism isn’t your grandfather’s old “two languages and a spare”. No, as the richness of humans’ relationships to one another (and to the entire created order) continues to entwickeln, new varieties of multilingualism are constantly arising. No longer can the simple term polyglot be expected to represent the full diversity of human linguistic competence.

Unfortunately, English vocabulary (unlike Eskimo vocabulary), hasn’t even made a pretense of keeping up. Each and every day a new form of super-multilingualism arises, and yet English-speaking linguists have just the one term to describe it.

As a public service, we at SpecGram are pleased to offer the barest smattering of terms, which may serve to describe some of the many new types of multilingual persons. This typology is based, of course, not only on our own experiences, but also on the linguistic behavior of people known personally to us. Therefore, we assure our readers that each and every one of these terms is sorely needed in English; memorize them all now, because danged if you won’t need one just about as soon as you meet a new person at the colloquium tomorrow!

Part II is presented below.

More to come...

It’s ... It’s ...!— A Linguistic Analysis of the Result of the Python PollPythagorina P. ap Pythonius
Artik-U-l8 Phoneme ServicesAdvertisement
SpecGram Vol CXC, No 3 Contents